He Liked Thick Word Soup – Software experiment about text, space and time

Created by Tel-Aviv based designer and programmer Ariel Malka, He Liked Thick Word Soup is the latest experiment in the Chronotext series, a growing collection of software experiments exploring the relation between text, space and time.

While some apps claim to increase your reading speed, He Liked Thick Word Soup does the opposite, forces you to read with your fingers. Through 4 episodes of increasing difficulty, your challenge is to wrestle with the text of James Joyce’s monumental work Ulysses, both mentally and physically. By the end, you will have read up to four pages and 100 sentences chosen from throughout the novel.

Your fingers’ dexterity will have increased by an exponential factor, and your point of view on Modernist literature and experimental apps will have changed forever.

The app plays differently depending on whether played on a phone or a tablet. Ariel and the team recommend experiencing both versions. The apps, available both for iOS and Android were made with Cinder and the new-chronotext-toolkit available on GitHub.